Guest Post - Rubber Stamp Carving, Part Two

... and, in conclusion: part two of Krystyna's rubber stamp carving post (part one lives here).

So, first off you'll need some materials, I have here a Rubber (just a standard eraser from the shops, this one came from Wilcos I think), a Pencil, a Cuticle Tool (as above) and an ink pad or marker pen.

Next, I draw around the rubber so I know how much space I have to play with. This time I decided to use the largest side. So in my sketchy little box I draw what I want to stamp. As I've been reading a lot of Potter themed things lately this little doodle seemed appropriate.

Then I press the rubber against the image so it transfers across, not always terrifically clear, but we can go over the lines with our pencil to make the image clearer and easier to work with. In this case I think I altered the image a little bit in the transfer but it still looks good.

Now we go to work with our cuticle tool, it's fairly easy going, just try and make the longest runs you can to keep your lines nice and clean. Just apply light pressure and let the tool do the work, remember, you can always take away but you can't really stick rubber back on if you take too much.

We're getting there, nearly done now really. So lets colour our stamp in with the marker or ink pad.

Looks good, so lets do our first stamp!

So we can see here where I need to take off a bit more rubber. Some at the top and a little at the sides. Re-ink and re-stamp and see what we've got.

And there we have it, one stamp, one rather pretty stamp if I do say so myself.

Northern Craftoholic signing out.

Guest Post - Rubber Stamp Carving, Part One

Over to Krystyna!

Ok, so, Hi! It's me again :D

Hrm... where to start. At the beginning I suppose.

So my beloved and I are organising a group trip to Cardiff at the end of this month (ARGH! Panic! Battle Stations! and the like) for our Aikido buddies, it'll be a week of training and boozing, erm, socialising, yes, socialising and one of the many jobs I'll have while we're there is registering people at the training sessions, for this we give each person a little A6 card with their time table on and we stamp each session as they arrive. All good.

Oh Noes! We don't have any stamps! Whatever shall we do?

I know! I'll make some! Only one thing, those carving tools are pricey and hard to find in the UK, probably have to order them from the interweb and that costs even more, but WAIT! What's this? A cuticle tool in the bottom of my make-up bag (2 actually but they were free with some stuff I bought a while back) no idea how to use it on my cuticles and that's a kind of scary prospect anyways but it looks very much like a stamp carving tool.

So how hard can it be? With some shaky nerves and a lot of nervous lip biting I managed these.

Of which, I am infact quite proud.

You're curious you say? To see how they came to be? Well it just so happens that I was asked to write about them, so I've made a little how to, to share my discovery with the world!

To be continued... (here!)

Northen Craftaholic